By Jim Geraghty
Thursday, December 08, 2022
Today you’re going to hear a lot of people defending the
Biden administration’s deal to secure the release of Brittney Griner by giving
Viktor Bout, the world’s most notorious arms dealer with a metaphorical ocean
of blood on his hands, back to Russia. (I called the then-potential deal a “moral abomination” back in August.) Not
securing the release of Paul Whelan makes this bad deal even worse.
A lot of defenders of the deal will contend that critics
are indifferent to the suffering of Griner, which is a dodge and a smear.
The question is not, “is it in the interest of the U.S. government to
secure the release of Brittney Griner?” That’s a silly question; the U.S. never
wants to see its citizens unfairly detained under brutal conditions on
trumped-up charges. The question is, what is an appropriate concession to
secure the release of those citizens, and does the payment of the ransom make
future problems like this more likely?
It is hard to overstate the crimes of Bout; if any human
being deserved to rot in prison for the rest of his days, it’s him. Longtime
State Department official Witney Schneidman, who tracked Bout delivering arms
to both sides of the Angola civil war, called Bout “the personification of evil.” From the end of
the Cold War until his arrest in 2008, if there was an arms embargo, Bout
flouted it — Liberia, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Congo, Libya. Whenever there
was a dictator or warlord who needed weapons to mow down his enemies or
suppress a suffering population, Bout was there to make a profit off of
bloodshed. He earned his nickname, “the Merchant of Death.”
Douglas Farah, a biographer of Bout, laid out his lifetime of monstrous
crimes:
Bout provided tons of guns and
ammunition to some of the most vicious warlords in the world and empowered them
to carry out unspeakable atrocities. He is responsible for enabling murderous
groups to kidnap and train thousands of child soldiers; use rape as a
systematic method of terror and control; torture through the mass amputations
of arms, legs, ears and lips; slaughter civilians, and help the Taliban take
power in Afghanistan. Griner may have been carrying vape cartridges that were
banned in Russia but not in much of the world. . . .
I covered the wars and victims of
Bout’s weapons trade in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Democratic Republic of Congo
as a correspondent for the Washington Post. The Nicolas Cage movie “Lord of
War” was loosely based on Bout, and I co-wrote with Stephen Braun a non-fiction
account of the savagery he enabled. There are no words to describe the human
toll of Bout’s activities on thousands of people, from the armless child
amputees in refugee camps to the scorched rural hamlets burned to the ground by
marauding children traumatized into killing their own families.
This summer Farah argued trading Griner and Whelan for
Bout was worthwhile, contending that as an old man, Bout was unlikely to return
to the arms trade. But there were other consequences glossed over, most notably
that by giving Vladimir Putin what he wants, we make other Americans in Russia
more likely to be detained and used as bargaining chips in the future. And
every other two-bit dictator and warlord around the world is watching and
learning, too.
After all, if the U.S. government is willing to release
Viktor Bout — at one point, the second-most-wanted man after Osama bin Laden! —
under enough pressure, then the U.S. government will release anyone under
enough pressure: terrorists like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Dzhokhar A.
Tsarnaev, spies like Robert Hanssen.
It is likely that one of the reasons the Biden
administration went ahead with this deal was their confidence that enough
allies would choose to characterize it as a major diplomatic victory, not an
epic concession to a hostile state that is likely to try to use the same
strongarm tactics again in the future.
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